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Meryl! Anderson! The Muppets! (Trust us.) From Jeffrey Eugenides' brilliant new novel and Madonna's brilliant turn behind the camera to TV's new funny girl and Eminem reincarnate, we've just made your cultural must-do list for the season

Get Your Oscar Ballots Ready! On The Heels of Her Blue Valentine Best Actress Nod: Michelle As Marilyn

In My Week With Marilyn, Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams channels the original bottle blond with surprisingly few flirtatious winks. Instead, she employs the melancholy, often empty-eyed gazes that characterized Norma Jeane while she filmed The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier during the summer of 1956. "It was an extraordinarily important moment in Marilyn's life," says director Simon Curtis. "She was newly married to this intellectual husband [Arthur Miller], and she came to England to work with Olivier because she thought she would be taken seriously as an actress. Michelle just had an instinct about Marilyn. We filmed at Pinewood [Studios], which was where [The Prince and the Showgirl] had been made, and when Michelle does that exquisite dance in my film, that was on the same soundstage where Marilyn had actually done that. There's something about retreading those steps that is incredibly potent."

ELLE 25

ELLE 25

The De Kooning Retrospective at MOMA: Art History

Abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning's career both invigorated and epitomized the midcentury New York art scene. Fourteen years after his death, the Museum of Modern Art, which in 1958 offered the artist a show—"not ready," he said then—will house a retrospective spanning nearly seven decades and featuring drawings, sculpture, prints, and paintings, including the biomorphic Pink Angels and Excavation, a fugue of shapes and crackling brushstrokes.